Separating the wheat from the chaff

Winnowing

Attackers impose a high price on your limited resources. We look at some ways to separate the good from the bad.

As you may have noticed, spam, web-based attacks, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks have gotten rather bad over the past few years. Currently, spam makes up about 90% of email messages; in other words, for every legitimate email you get, your server has to handle around nine spam messages. For online retailers, the stakes can be much higher. DoS attacks at the height of the shopping season can have a hugely negative impact. So, what can you do to deal with these problems?

Related content

Vendors continue to develop new defenses against spam, one of the Internet’s most notorious pests. In this article, we integrate Postgrey with the Postfix mail server for a greylisting and whitelisting solution.

While going about his normal duties, Linux Magazine author Charly Kühnast was hit with a mean attack. Charly’s separate anti-spam server, which sits in front of his mail server, saved him from the mail storm.